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ABSTRACT: Ever since the 2006 World Health Report advocated increased community participation and the systematic delegation of tasks to less-specialized cadres, there has been a great deal of debate about the expediency, efficacy and modalities of task shifting.The delegation of tasks from one cadre to another, previously often called substitution, is not a new concept. It has been used in many countries and for many decades, either as a response to emergency needs or as a method to provide adequate care at primary and secondary levels, especially in understaffed rural facilities, to enhance quality and reduce costs. However, rapidly increasing care needs generated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and accelerating human resource crises in many African countries have given the concept and practice of task shifting new prominence and urgency. Furthermore, the question arises as to whether task shifting and increased community participation can be more than a short-term solution to address the HIV/AIDS crisis and can contribute to a revival of the primary health care approach as an answer to health systems crises.In this commentary we argue that, while task shifting holds great promise, any long-term success of task shifting hinges on serious political and financial commitments. We reason that it requires a comprehensive and integrated reconfiguration of health teams, changed scopes of practice and regulatory frameworks and enhanced training infrastructure, as well as availability of reliable medium- to long-term funding, with time frames of 20 to 30 years instead of three to five years. The concept and practice of community participation needs to be revisited.Most importantly, task shifting strategies require leadership from national governments to ensure an enabling regulatory framework; drive the implementation of relevant policies; guide and support training institutions and ensure adequate resources; and harness the support of the multiple stakeholders. With such leadership and a willingness to learn from those with relevant experience (for example, Brazil, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia), task shifting can indeed make a vital contribution to building sustainable, cost-effective and equitable health care systems. Without it, task shifting runs the risk of being yet another unsuccessful health sector reform initiative.

status: published

Given a wind farm with known dimensions and number of wind turbines, we try to find the optimum positioning of wind turbines that maximises wind-farm energy production. In practice, given that optimisation has to be performed for many wind directions, and taking into account the yearly wind distribution, such an optimisation is computationally only feasible using fast engineering wake models such as the Jensen model. These models are known to have accuracy issues, in particular since their representation of wake interaction is very simple. In the present work, we propose an optimisation approach that is based on a hybrid combination of large-eddy simulation (LES) and the Jensen model; in this approach, optimisation is mainly performed using the Jensen model, and LES is used at a few points only during optimisation for online tuning of the wake-expansion coefficient in the Jensen model, as well as for validation of the results. An optimisation case study is considered, in which the placement of 30 turbines in a 4 km by 3 km rectangular domain is optimised in a neutral atmospheric boundary layer. Optimisation for both a single wind direction and multiple wind directions is discussed.

Current assessments of residential building energy demand focus mainly on their operational aspect, notably in terms of space heating and cooling. The embodied energy of buildings and the transport energy consumption of their occupants are typically overlooked. Recent studies have shown that these two energy demands can represent more than half of the life cycle energy of a building over 50 years.This study presents a holistic method which takes into account energy requirements at the building scale, i.e. the embodied and operational energy of the building and its refurbishment, and at the city scale, i.e. the embodied energy of nearby infrastructures (roads, power lines, etc.) and the transport energy (direct and indirect) of its users. This method has been implemented through the development of a software tool which allows the rapid analysis of the life cycle energy demand of buildings at different scales.A case study, located near Melbourne, Australia, confirms that each of the embodied, operational and transport requirements are nearly equally important. Embodied and transport energy consumption represent on average 63% of the life cycle energy requirements. By integrating these three energy flows, the developed method and software tool provide building designers, planners and decision makers with a powerful means to effectively reduce the overall energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions associated with residential buildings. info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Cellulose and hemicelluloses are the most abundant structural polysaccharide in nature. Their optimal valorization in lignocellulose-based biorefineries requires a good knowledge of the contents available in various biomasses, and of their molecular composition. The composition and more specifically the monosaccharidic content (cellulosic glucan, xylan, arabinan, mannan, galactan and hemicellulosic glucan) were analyzed in several lignocellulosic grass crops: switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.), tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.), cocksfoot-alfalfa association (Dactylis glomerata L.-Medicago sativa L.). Cellulose and hemicelluloses contents were in the range 20.8-33.3 and 14.5-32.6 g (100gDM)-1, respectively, with lignin, total soluble sugars, proteins, and ash contents around 2.9-7.8, 2.0-21.7, 5.7-17.2 and 4.3-16.3 g (100gDM)-1, respectively. The main hemicellulosic components were, by order of decreasing importance, xylan 8.3-23.2 g (100gDM)-1, arabinan 2.12-4.10 g (100gDM)-1, hemicellulosic glucan 1.36-3.42 g (100gDM)-1, galactan 0.63-2.31 g (100gDM)-1 and mannan 0.27-1.08 g (100gDM)-1. Plant species and harvest cycle has the most significant influence on the structural polysaccharide composition, while the influences of cultivar and nitrogen fertilization were only rarely significant.

This repository contains the following folders: input_data.zip: scripts used to process the raw input data of the study and generate the files input to the scrips in the folder "calculations". Scripts should be run following the numerical order of the names. The subfolder "input_raster" contains the following raster files with spatially-explicit resolution at global scale: current_syn_nitrogen-2020-reproj.tif: 2020 Nitrogen demand; area-2020-reproj.tif: area of each pixel in the raster; GHI-resampled-reproj.tif: solar global horizontal irradiation; PVOUT-resampled-reproj.tif: solar global capacity factor. calculations.zip: scripts to reproduce the results of the paper. Scripts should be run following the numerical order of the names. The subfolder "input" contains the file "parameters_cost.xlsx" which collects the parametrs used for the quantification of the local cost of ammonia production. In the same folder, the file "ammonia_prices.xlsx" contains the list of reference prices from the historical ammonia market price distribution considered for the comparison of distributed vs centralized ammonia production. plot.zip: scripts to reproduce the figures presented in the paper. Scripts should be run following the numerical order of the script name.

The SUBLime Project (SUstainable Building Lime applications via Circular Economy and Biomimetic Approaches) is a collaborative and interdisciplinary project that brings together 6 academic beneficiaries and 11 industrial partners via a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action European Training Network – Innovative Training Network. The network provides grounds for research and training opportunities and combines knowledge of academic and industrial members, who craft the future of new construction and conservation of built heritage using lime-based materials. The project covers the main features of lime-based applications in masonry construction, including material characterization, numerical modelling of multi-physics behaviour and development of innovative and sustainable lime-based solutions with added functionality. The protocol of mortar preparation for testing is used by participants of the SUBLime Project as fundamental guidance on making masonry mortars. The protocol focuses on important aspects of mortar preparation, such as conditioning of constituent materials, mixing and compaction procedures, curing of mortars. Well-detailed descriptions of these aspects are provided to ensure the proper execution of experiments. This comprehensive approach would enable the validation of non-standard experimental methods and repeatability of results of testing of different lime, lime-cement and cement-based mortars. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie project SUBLime [Grant Agreement n.955986]. This work was partly financed by FCT/MCTES through national funds (PIDDAC) under the R&D Unit Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in Structural Engineering (ISISE), under reference UIDB/04029/2020.